Roger Kahn, 1927-2020

Why do I love New York? It's not just because of my family origins there. It's that no other place on Earth so intertwines pursuits both intellectual and athletic. You can be the brain and still work your way into the world of the jocks, and they can like it. And, sometimes, you can get them to show that they belong in your world as well, and the ones who will want to will seek you out.

No one did that better than Roger Kahn.

He was born on October 31, 1927 in Brooklyn. He was descended from Jews who escaped the European revolutions of 1848, and his parents -- both teachers, Gordon taught history and Olga taught English -- encouraged him in intellectual pursuits, studying the classics.

Gordon loved baseball and their home-Borough Dodgers. Olga had no use for sports, but, toward the end of her life, Roger introduced her to some of the players he'd covered, and she realized they were well-developed people, not just athletes.

(For those of you who may recognize the name from Kahn's, sellers of hot dogs at Shea Stadium lo those many years: As far as I can tell, Roger's family was not connected to that company.)

Roger graduated from Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High School, and they were happy that he went to New York University. His parents didn't care that NYU then had a great basketball program. They cared that it was a great school. He then got a copyboy job at the New York Herald Tribune.

The Trib was the classic old-time "liberal Republican" newspaper, taking stands in favor of civil rights at home and abroad, but sticking with the old-money men (as it was run by) to the point of sticking with the GOP all through the Great Depression and beyond: Herbert Hoover even in 1932, Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon in 1960.

But it also had an exceptional sports department, run by an exceptional man, Stanley Woodward. In 1933, he became the 1st writer to call the collection of universities that included Harvard, Yale and Princeton "the Ivy League," and the name stuck until an official league with that name was founded in 1955. Woodward himself went to Amherst College, which could have been admitted to that League, but wasn't.

Being a respectable broadsheet, not a loud tabloid like the Daily News, the Post or the Mirror, the Trib's big competition was The New York Times, which had twice as many people working in its sports department. When Woodward became sports editor of the Trib in 1938, he said, "They've got a lot of people, so we can't outcrap 'em, but we sure as hell can outwrite 'em."

And they did: It took a long time -- probably until 1966, when the Trib, the Journal-American and the World-Telegram & Sun all folded due to escalating costs -- before the Times had the best sports section in town. Woodward hired Red Smith away from the Philadelphia Record, and he became perhaps the greatest sportswriter who ever lived, moving on to the Times after the Trib folded.

Woodward also hired John Lardner, son of the great Chicago-based sportswriter Ring Lardner, and brother of Ring Lardner Jr., a screenwriter blacklisted for his leftist leanings, the last survivor of "The Hollywood Ten."

Incidentally, there was another blacklisted screenwriter, named Gordon Kahn, also from New York City, although born in Hungary. As far as I can tell, he wasn't related to Roger.

Woodward was fired as editor in 1948, due to internal politics at the paper, but not before he had recognized Roger Kahn's writing ability and promoted him. In 1952, just 24 years old, and Brooklyn-raised yet cultured -- certainly not the image of the crusty, cigar-chomping old sportswriter -- he was named the beat writer for the Brooklyn Dodgers, his boyhood team.

In the 1952 and '53 seasons, he got close to the players, including future Baseball Hall-of-Famers Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Edwin "Duke" Snider, and the team Captain, Harold "Pee Wee" Reese; All-Stars Gil Hodges, Carl Furillo, Carl Erskine, Billy Cox and Elwin "Preacher" Roe; and role players George "Shotgun" Shuba, Andy Pafko, Clem Labine and Joe Black.

It's worth noting that the man generally thought of as the Dodgers' ace pitcher, Don Newcombe, was serving in the Korean War, and thus was not with the team in either of those seasons. Therefore, there is no profile on him for The Boys of Summer.

Being Jewish and having faced discrimination, he had sympathy, if not a full understanding, for what black players Robinson, Campanella and Black were going through. They found that they could trust him to write about them fairly. Some people didn't like that: Dodger manager Charlie Dressen called him "Robinson's bobo."

Kahn began The Boys of Summer with these words:

At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams. During the early 1950s, the Jackie Robinson Brooklyn Dodgers were outspoken, opinionated, bigoted, tolerant, black, white, open, passionate: in short, a fascinating mix of vigorous men. They were not, however, the most successful team in baseball.

The Dodgers won the National League Pennant in 1952, and again in 1953, but lost the World Series to the Yankees each time. A few days after the '53 Series, Roger's father died, only 52 years old.

Another change came the following season: The Trib transferred Roger away from the team he loved, to cover the team he, like all Dodger fans, hated, the New York Giants. He enjoyed covering their players, especially young superstar Willie Mays. He did not enjoy covering their manager, the corrupt, profane, egomaniacal Leo Durocher, who had once played shortstop for, and then managed, the Dodgers, before the team had finally had enough of him, and let him cross town to the "Jints."

The Giants won the 1954 World Series, which is not the same thing as "getting Kahn his ring," but at least he got to cover a World Champion. The Dodgers finally won it all the next year. By that point, he was on the staff of a new magazine, Sports Illustrated. He didn't like it, and when Newsweek offered to make him their sports editor in 1956, he jumped at the chance. In 1963, he moved on to The Saturday Evening Post.

By that point, his personal life was in turmoil. In 1950, he married Joan Rappaport. They had a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1954, but she died the day after her birth. In 1957, they had a son, whom they named for his grandfather. Roger would eventually dedicate a book "to a pair of aces," his father and his son, both named Gordon Jacques Kahn.

But in 1963, Roger began an affair with Alice Lippincott Russell, and she became pregnant. His 1st marriage ended in a very nasty divorce, and he married Alice. Their son, Roger Laurence Kahn, was born in 1964. They also had a daughter, Alissa Avril Kahn, in 1967.

In this period, Roger stepped away from sports to write on other subjects. He wrote a book about his faith, but was disappointed when his publisher chose the title The Passionate People: What It Means to Be a Jew in America. He also wrote about the 1968 student demonstrations at Columbia University: The Battle for Morningside Heights: Why Students Rebel.

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The world was changing, and people of Kahn's generation, who grew up in the Great Depression, fought in World War II (although he was too young to do so, turning 18 after V-J Day), and built the great suburban postwar economy, had trouble handling it.

They began to look back, and the 1950s nostalgia wave began. It produced the musical Grease, and the film American Graffiti -- which took place in in 1962, but the early '60s were ,culturally, an extension of the '50s. Together, these 2 led to the TV sitcom Happy Days (which, like American Graffiti, starred Ron Howard). It also produced Richard Nader's "Garden Party" shows at Madison Square Garden, as the hits of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years became "oldies," and this led to "oldies" stations like New York's WCBS-FM, founded in 1972.

It led Paul Simon, one of the era's big singers and songwriters, to look to baseball as an exemplar of a simpler, more innocent time, which it really wasn't: In "Mrs. Robinson," he wrote, "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you."

That song was Number 1 in America on June 6, 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy died from an assassin's bullet. The student unrest at Columbia was still ongoing, as was that in Paris. Martin Luther King had been assassinated 2 months before RFK, and a racist backlash against the Civil Rights Movement was in full gear. No one could think of a way to end the Vietnam War. The present seemed hopeless. (It was a time not unlike the present, although the details are considerably different.)

Roger Kahn, too, began to think of baseball again. Specifically, his team, which had been moved to Los Angeles by its greedy owner, Walter O'Malley, after the 1957 season, 11 years earlier -- just as the Yankees' last title and the hopeful beginning of the Obama Administration now is for us:

The team grew old. The Dodgers deserted Brooklyn. Wreckers swarmed into Ebbets Field and leveled the stand. Soil that had felt the spikes of Robinson & Reese was washed from the faces of mewling children. The New York Herald Tribune writhed, changed its face and collapsed. I covered a team that no longer exists in a demolished ballpark for a newspaper that is dead.

Remembering and appreciating the time which was not so very long ago, I found myself wondering more and more about the ball players. They are retired athletes now, but not old. They are scattered wide, but joined by a common memory. How are the years with them? What past do they remember? Have they come at length to realize what they had?

Unlike most, a ball player must confront two deaths. First, between the ages of thirty and forty he perishes as an athlete. Although he looks trim and feels vigorous and retains unusual coordination, the superlative reflexes, the major league reflexes, pass on. At a point when many of his classmates are newly confident and rising and other fields, he finds he can no longer hit a very good fast ball or reach a grounder four strides to his right. At thirty-five he is experiencing the truth of finality. As his major league career is ending, all things will end. However, he sprang, he was always earthbound. Mortality embraces him. The golden age has passed as in a moment. So, will all things. So will all moments. Memento Mori.

And so, on December 15, 1968, he placed a phone call to Newport, Pennsylvania, outside Harrisburg, to reach a man he hadn't spoken to in 14 years, not because he didn't want to, but because he had no professional reason to. A bartender. Who happened to be, in Kahn's opinion, the greatest 3rd baseman he ever saw, Billy Cox. Cox was surprised that someone from New York would want to come all the way out there just to talk to him.

Thus began the process of writing The Boys of Summer, Kahn's look back at his childhood as a Dodger fan, his look back at his professional start covering the team, and his quest to see how his old heroes were doing. He took the title from a poem by Dylan Thomas, who died in New York in 1953, a few days after Kahn's father Gordon also did so, in his case even younger, at 39, a result of massive drinking:

I see the boys of summer in their ruin Lay the gold tithings barren, Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils; There in their heat the winter floods Of frozen loves they fetch their girls, And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.

The poem continues, 9 stanzas of 6 lines each, pointing out that time takes its toll, until so does death.

In his preface to the book, Kahn said, "I mean to be less concerned with curve balls than with the lure of the team." He spoke of the connection of the people of Brooklyn with the team, with the players, and with the ballpark, Ebbets Field. He cited Brooklyn's multiethnic nature and its distinctive accent.

And he wrote of Jackie Robinson, and how his acceptance -- first by the Dodger organization, eventually by his teammates, and finally by the baseball establishment -- gave the Dodgers a nobility that no other team could reach.

And then, after '57, they were gone. A few of the Dodger stars he wrote about would help the Los Angeles edition of the team win the World Series in 1959. A few of the players who replaced them and helped the Brooklyn edition win in 1955 would still be there on the title teams of 1963 and 1965. (Sandy Koufax debuted in '55, but he did not became an effective, let alone sensational, major league pitcher until '61.)

As with the 1969 Seattle Pilots -- written about in the other "greatest book ever written about baseball," pitcher Jim Bouton's Ball Four -- the Brooklyn Dodgers don't seem possible. They seem like a literary construction -- which, I suppose, Kahn would have appreciated, had he not been there to watch, love, and report on them.

Like Ball Four, The Boys of Summer often seems less like reporting on true events and more like a novel, especially since, in the style of what was becoming known as "the new journalism," Kahn, as with Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night and Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, had made himself a character in the book.

It was published on February 25, 1972, to mixed reviews, with those who didn't like it citing it as mawkish and too sentimental (as if sentiment wasn't the damn point); and with those who did like it going overboard, with the reviewer for Sports Illustrated calling it "a baseball book the same way Moby-Dick is a fishing book."

That same year, another New Yorker named Roger, Roger Angell, published The Summer Game, the 1st collection of his baseball-themed essays for The New Yorker magazine, which would eventually include the magisterial Five Seasons -- the seasons in question being 1972 to 1976, years of huge changes in the sport.

In spite of their common given name and their common profession, there are tremendous differences. Angell is from Manhattan instead of Brooklyn, Protestant instead of Jewish, an Ivy Leaguer (Harvard) instead of an NYU man, and was 7 years older, old enough to have served in World War II.

Most notably, he was a fan of the Dodgers' arch-rivals, the Giants. But while he has written extraordinary pieces on the game, including collaborating with David Cone on the memoir A Pitcher's Story, and spoke of the Giants' move, also to California in 1957, to San Francisco, as "Absolutely heartbreaking" when interviewed for Ken Burns' miniseries Baseball, he's never written a book about the New York edition of the Giants.

Several good books about those Giants have been written. But they have no Boys of Summer. Peter Golenbock, a Yankee Fan, wrote Dynasty about the 1949-64 Yankees, as a response to The Boys of Summer. And Angell and many others had the talent to write about the Giants, but didn't make the corresponding attempt that Kahn did for his Dodgers.

Noel Hynd wrote The Giants of the Polo Grounds, but that was about the team's entire history, 1883 to 1957. Good books have been written about the John McGraw era, 1902 to 1932 (including the tenure of Christy Mathewson, 1900 to 1916). Good books have been written about the 1951 Pennant race between the Giants and the Dodgers, which ended with the Bobby Thomson home run, including Thomson's own memoir. And good books have been written about Willie Mays, particularly about the Giants' 1954 World Series triumph, highlighted by Mays' stunning catch in Game 1 of the World Series.

But because the 1950s Giants have no loving nostalgic look on the scale of The Boys of Summer, they have practically been forgotten. Today's young baseball fans know about Thomson's home run and Mays' catch. I've shown my older nieces, now 12, both highlights. They know the Giants and Dodgers were once in New York City, and have been in California since 1958. But they don't know about McGraw, Mathewson, Fred Merkle, Frankie Frisch, Bill Terry, Mel Ott or Carl Hubbell. Some of these guys played 100 years ago, or more, and for kids today, it might as well have been 1,000 years.

Somebody should have written about the 1950s Giants. And I do mean the baseball team. The football version of the New York Giants has had nice looks back written about it. But the baseball team? Never mind McGraw and Mathewson: Today's fans need to know about not just Thomson and Mays, but also about Monte Irvin, Sal Maglie, Alvin Dark, Don Mueller, Dusty Rhodes and Johnny Antonelli.

(Roger Angell is still alive: If he makes it to September 19, he will be 100 years old. Hopefully, I'll get to write a Centennial tribute and post it on that day, instead of having to write an obituary and do it sooner.) (UPDATE: I was able to write that tribute. As of the Inauguration of President Joe Biden on January 20, 2021, Angell is still alive.)

In the 2nd edition of The Boys of Summer, Kahn noted that lots of people were able to identify with the middle-aged Dodger players. Roy Campanella had been paralyzed in a car crash. Jackie Robinson saw his son Jackie Jr. come back from Vietnam with what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, turn to drugs, get in legal trouble, get clean, and then be killed in an auto accident of his own. Several of them, without college degrees and a good off-season work history to fall back on, had to turn to manual labor. Clem Labine had to care for a developmentally disabled child.

But Kahn rejected the "ill-fated" label for them:

Any random group of thirteen Americans turning fifty might show equivalent whips and scorns of time. That was a comfortable response and possibly accurate. Besides, one could add, all the old Dodgers were still alive. Then on April 2, 1972, Gil Hodges fell backward onto a sidewalk in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the Mets had gone to play an exhibition game. A second coronary had hit the old first baseman. He was forty-seven.

Hodges, who had managed the Mets to their "Miracle" World Championship season in 1969, and was 2 days short of his 48th birthday. He remains the last manager or head coach of a major league sports team in the New York Tri-State Area to die in office.

Jackie Robinson, wracked with diabetes, giving him heart trouble, robbing him of most of his sight, and threatening amputation of the most famous legs in baseball history, was quoted by Kahn as saying he was surprised that Gil would be the first to go, thinking that he, himself, would be the first. A few months later, on October 24, 1972, Jackie was the next to go. 

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The Boys of Summer made Kahn a legend at age 44. He could have rested on his laurels and never written another book, becoming another J.D. Salinger -- or, since the real Salinger was still alive, and didn't want to be portrayed in Field of Dreams, as he had been in the novel based on it, Shoeless Joe, another Terence Mann.

Instead, he kept writing. He continued to put out collections of essays. He wrote novels. He wrote A Flame of Pure Fire, a biography of 1920s Heavyweight Champion Jack Dempsey. He wrote Joe & Marilyn: A Memory of Love, taking a big risk writing about the DiMaggio-Monroe relationship while Joe was still alive. He ghost-wrote Pete Rose's post-ban memoir.

And he wrote October Men: Reggie Jackson, George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin, and the Yankees' Miraculous Finish in 1978. It may have seemed sacrilege to his original fans, Dodger fans, to see Kahn write about not just a team from the next generation, but a Yankee team, one that was not particularly lovable -- unless you were an 8-year-old kid in Jersey, like I was, or something close to that.

But he continued to focus on the period that began his career. He published The Era: 1947-1957, When the Yankees, the Giants and the Dodgers Ruled the World. This idea would be reinforced when Ken Burns made Baseball, titling his chapter on the 1950s Seventh Inning: The Capital of Baseball. Unfortunately, Burns did not interview Kahn for it. (He did interview Angell; Jackie's widow, Rachel Robinson; Clyde Sukeforth, the scout who brought Jackie to the Dodgers; and Hall-of-Fame players Bob Feller, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle and Hank Aaron.)

In 1987, on the 40th Anniversary of Jackie Robinson's debut, Kahn was invited to speak on the subject on ABC News' Nightline. Another guest on that program was the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Al Campanis, who also knew Jackie well.

Host Ted Koppel asked Campanis why there weren't more black men as managers or in front offices, and Campanis gave an answer that showed that he was racist and didn't even realize it. Koppel gave him 2 chances to get out of the hole, and he only dug himself in deeper. Kahn pointed out that Campanis' answers were a succession -- not a "progression," and hardly an "evolution" -- of the things the opponents of integration had said in 1947.

The year 1987 would get harder for Kahn. His son Roger battled depression and drugs, tried rehab, and took his own life. Later that year, his mother Olga reached the close of a long and interesting, but not famous, life.

He would include a tribute to his mother, along with pieces on various baseball figures, in Memories of Summer: When Baseball was an Art and Writing About it a Game in 1993. That book also included profiles of Mays, whom Kahn called the greatest ballplayer he ever saw; and of Mantle, who was a terrible interview subject back then, never seemed to learn his lessons until it was too late, and led Kahn to say, "No, you couldn't possibly approve of Mickey Mantle. What you could do was love him."

It would take until 2006, and Into My Own: The Remarkable People and Events That Shaped a Life, before Roger Kahn the father could publish something about Roger Kahn the son. It also included chapters about Robert Frost, Stanley Woodward, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, and 1968 Presidential candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had all been friends of his. He also wrote of his 2 failed marriages, and having found love one more time, with psychotherapist Katharine Colt Johnson, in 1989, possibly as a result of dealing with his grief over his son.

Together, they lived in Stone Ridge, Ulster County, New York, on the west side of the Hudson River, nearly 100 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, and seemingly a planet away from his Brooklyn youth. He taught journalism at the nearby New Paltz campus of the State University of New York.

Recently, he had to be moved to an assisted-living facility in Mamaroneck, Westchester County, and he died there this past Thursday, February 6, 2020. He was 92 years old.

He outlived all of the subjects of The Boys of Summer, except for one: Carl Erskine, the Indiana-born curveball master who pitched 2 no-hitters from Brooklyn, 1 of them against the hated Giants, thrilled Dodger fans by striking out 14 Yankees in Game 4 of the 1953 World Series (then a Series record), and enjoyed reciting poetry with Kahn on roadtrips. "Oisk," as he was called in the Brooklyn accent, recently turned 93, still lives in Anderson, Indiana, and, last I heard, was in good health.

(UPDATE: Roger Kahn was cremated, and so there is no gravesite for his fans to visit.)

I close with the words that Washington Post reviewer Andrew Ervin wrote in his review for Into My Own, which, I have no doubt, were very satisfying to Roger Kahn: "It proves that Kahn's not only a great baseball writer but also something rarer: a great writer whose subject happens to be baseball."

Brooklyn Triumphant and Other October 4 Anniversaries

October 4, 1955, 57 years ago today: The Brooklyn Dodgers beat the New York Yankees, 2-0, in Game 7 of the World Series.

(This is a previous post, updated.)

After losing the World Series to Boston in 1916, to Cleveland in 1920, and to the Yankees in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1953; blowing Playoffs for the National League Pennant to St. Louis in 1946 and to the New York Giants in 1951; and blowing Pennants on the last weekend of the season to St. Louis in 1942 and Philadelphia in 1950, the Dodgers had finally won their first undisputed World Championship in 55 years, since they finished the 1900 season as National League Champions, with no postseason series available.

But in 1955, it all seemed to come together. True, the Dodgers had traded away two of the beloved players who would later be known, in the title of the book that Roger Kahn wrote in remembrance of his days covering them for the New York Herald Tribune, as "The Boys of Summer": Pitcher Elwyn "Preacher" Roe and third baseman Billy Cox. The team was in transition: Jackie Robinson was still a factor, but his replacements had arrived in Jim "Junior" Gilliam and Don Zimmer. Ralph Branca, the goat of the 1951 Playoff, had retired, but the Dodgers still had Don Newcombe and Carl Erskine, and they were joined by a hotshot lefty named Johnny Podres.

The Dodgers won their first 13 games of the '55 season, and finished 13 games ahead of the preseason favorites, the Milwaukee Braves. But the Yankees took the first two games of the World Series, despite Robinson's steal of home plate in Game 1. But the Dodgers took the next three at Ebbets Field. Then the Yankees tied it up. In fact, the home team won each of the first 6 home games.

October 4, 1955. Game 7 of the World Series. Yankee Stadium. The Boys of Summer were getting old. The younger Dodgers didn't quite seem ready. The team was in transition, and it did seem like it had been a seamless one; but for veterans like shortstop Pee Wee Reese, first baseman Gil Hodges, center fielder Duke Snider and catcher Roy Campanella -- along with Robinson, all but Hodges are in the Hall of Fame and he damn well should be -- it was now or never.

Podres was the choice of manager Walter Alston, having won Game 3. Yankee manager Casey Stengel, with ace Whitey Ford having pitched brilliantly in Game 6, had to go with Tommy Byrne, a lefty who was occasionally wild, but had come up big for Stengel in several big games.

The Dodgers scored a run in the 4th and another in the 6, to take a 2-0 lead. But the Yankees got two men on in the bottom of the 6th. And Yogi Berra, as much a "Mr. October" as the Yankees have ever had, was coming up. Yogi had delighted in hitting Series homers off the Dodgers, and would again. To hell with the lefty-on-lefty matchup: Yogi had no fear. And, despite usually being a pull hitter, Yogi hooked the ball down the left-field line, into the corner.

Left field had long been a troublesome position for the Dodgers. Gene Hermanski. Cal Abrams. George "Shotgun" Shuba. Andy Pafko had played it well, but for whatever reason they got rid of him. Now Zimmer was the usual left fielder, though he was a natural infielder. But Alston had pinch-hit Gilliam for Zimmer, and put Gilliam in at second, replacing the righty-throwing Zimmer in left with lefty-throwing Sandy Amoros, a Cuban whose English was halting but whose play, on this day, changed baseball history.

A righthanded fielder, like Zimmer, never could have caught this ball, no matter how fast he was. But Amoros was fast and lefthanded, and he stuck out his right hand and caught the ball. Then he wheeled it back to the infield. Reese relayed it to Hodges, and Gil McDougald was unable to get back to first in time. Double play end of threat.

Doris Kearns was a 12-year-old girl living in Rockville Centre, Long Island at the time. Years later, award-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin would cite Amoros' robbery of Berra and the ensuing rally-killing double play as a sign that the Dodgers would win. "There's always these omens in baseball," she said. Translation: If the Dodgers could get Yogi out in a key situation, then that was it, the Yankees would not threaten again.

Bottom of the 9th. Two out. Podres has pitched a stomach-churning game: Eight hits, but no runs. The last batter is Elston Howard. Six months earlier, Howard had become the first black man to play in a regular-season game for the Yankees, and was now the left fielder and Yogi's backup at catcher. In 1959, they would switche positions, and Ellie would become one of the game's best catchers. In 1955, he was a 26-year-old "rookie," having played in the Negro Leagues for a while.

Howard grounded to short. It was so appropriate that it went to Harold Henry Reese, the Dodgers' Captain and senior player. Pee Wee threw it to Gil Hodges, and Hodges, perhaps the best-fielding first baseman of his era, had to trap it on the ground to keep it from being an error and bringing the tying run to the plate. But he got it.

Ballgame over. World Series over. With Red Barber having been chased out of Brooklyn by team owner Walter O'Malley after the 1953 season, it was Vin Scully who got to make the announcement over the airwaves: "Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the World Champions of baseball."

Not exactly how Mel Allen, Phil Rizzuto or John Sterling would have described it.

It had been 55 years -- or 52 years if you count only from the first World Series forward. The 0-for-7, and 0-for-5 against the Yankees, no longer mattered.

“Please don’t interrupt,” Shirley Povich wrote for the next day's Washington Post, “because you haven’t heard this one before: The Brooklyn Dodgers are World Champions of baseball.” (Povich wrote for the Post from 1924, when Walter Johnson finally pitched them to the World Series, until his death in 1998. His son is the TV journalist Maury Povich.)

And they did it at Yankee Stadium, no less. They never clinched a World Championship at Ebbets Field -- although the Yankees had, in '41, '49 and '52, and would again in '56. Not until '63 would the Dodger franchise clinch a World Series win on their home field.

The party in Brooklyn was the biggest since V-J Day ended World War II 10 years earlier. Scully told the story for Ken Burns’ miniseriesBaseball: "When we were riding through Manhattan, it was fall. Football was in the air. We came out the other end of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, and it was New Orleans chaos!"

No more "Wait 'Til Next Year." This was Next Year. The next day's New York Daily News had the famous headline, "WHO'S A BUM!" Willard Mullin, who had drawn the "Dodger Bum" cartoon character, drew him again, a big nearly-toothless smile, for that front page, consisting only of that headline and that drawing.

Two personnel notes should be made. One is that Mickey Mantle was injured and unable to play in Game 7 for the Yankees. Does that mean the one and only World Series won by the Brooklyn Dodgers should have an asterisk? No. There's no guarantee that Mickey would have made the difference, even though he had hit the Dodgers hard in the '52 and '53 Series, and would again in '56. Although he was one of the true Mr. Octobers, he didn't always have a good Series, and in fact went only 2-for-10 in the 3 Series games he did get into in '55, even if one of those hits was a homer off Podres in Game 3.

The other personnel note is that Jackie Robinson was not put into the lineup in Game 7. The noblest character in the history of baseball was deemed unworthy of this moment by his manager. Alston was not a Jackie Robinson fan. Neither was owner O'Malley. But on the highlight film, you can see Number 42 running onto the field. After all he'd been through, at 36 he still had enough energy to be one of the first men into the celebratory pile, if not enough energy to persuade his manager to put him into the lineup. But can we really argue with the decision? After all, it worked.

There are still 7 living members of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers. Zimmer and Shuba are the only 2 who played in the game, plus Carl Erskine, Roger Craig, Ed Roebuck, and two lefthanded pitchers worth mentioning.

One was a Brooklyn kid who had made his major league debut that season, appearing in 12 games, nothing remarkable yet. He wanted to be an architect, and had so studied at the University of Cincinnati. He also preferred basketball to baseball. Eventually, he would get his pitching straightened out, and become one of the very best men ever to mount a pitcher’s mound. His name was Sandy Koufax.

The other was a chunky guy from outside Philadelphia who had starred for the Dodgers’ Triple-A farm team, the Montreal Royals, but his entire big-league career consisted of 4 games for Brooklyn in both the ’54 and ’55 seasons, then 18 more the next season for the Kansas City Athletics. Despite his pitching for that team, he never got on the Kansas City/Bronx shuttle. Maybe it was because he got into a fight with Yankee 2nd baseman Billy Martin. But by 1977, he and Billy were shaking hands in World Series pregame ceremonies, as Pennant-winning managers. And Italians. His name was Tommy Lasorda. Ironically, it was Lasorda’s Dodgers who went back to his old stomping grounds of Montreal and ended the one and only postseason run ever made by the Royals’ National League successors, the Expos.

There are 9 living members of the 1955 New York Yankees. Berra, Bob Cerv and Bob Turley played in Game 7; also on the roster were Ford, Jerry Coleman, Don Larsen (still a year away from his moment in time), Johnny Kucks (a Hoboken, New Jersey native whose moment came 2 days after Larsen’s), Irv Noren and Tom Carroll (a Queens native who was a defensive replacement in 2 games and only played 64 games in the majors).  Bill “Moose” Skowron and Andy Carey were on that list, but both have died since last October 4.

October 4, 1955, 3:43 PM Brooklyn Standard Time. Dem Bums had finally dooed it.

Two years later, it would all be over. And only one man had imagined such a blasphemy. Unfortunately, the blasphemer was the caretaker of the faith, Walter Francis O'Malley.

In 1962, the Metropolitan Baseball Club of New York -- that was the original corporate name of the team we know as the Mets -- did something that had previously been done only by hatred of the Yankees: United the fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the fans of the New York Giants. Until 1996, including even the Yankees' quasi-dynasty of 1976-81, the Mets were New York's most popular team.

That is no longer the case, and a person would have to be at least 60 years old to have any memory of the previous National League teams of New York; more like 65 to remember such events as the '55 win and Willie Mays' catch in '54, nearly 70 to accurately remember Bobby Thomson's homer in '51, 75 to remember Jackie Robinson's debut season in '47, about 80 to remember the '41 season that began the Dodgers' renaissance, and at least 85 to remember the Giant teams that won 3 Pennants in the 1930s.

Long time passing.

*

October 4, 1923: Charlton Heston is born in Wilmette, Illinois.  He played an aging quarterback in the 1969 film Number One.

October 4, 1935: Game 3 of the World Series is a wild one.  Chicago Cubs manager Charlie Grimm and 2 of his players, 3rd baseman Woody English and outfielder Tuck Stainback, are thrown out of the game for bench-jockeying.  Coach Del Baker of the Detroit Tigers is also thrown out, for arguing a pickoff play at 3rd base.  That's 4 uniformed men thrown out of 1 World Series game -- and none was actually playing in the game! The game goes to 11 innings, and is won 6-5 by the Tigers, on Jo-Jo White's single scoring Marv Owen.

October 4, 1948: In a one-game playoff for the AL pennant at Fenway Park‚ the Cleveland Indians beat the Boston Red Sox 8-3, behind 30-year-old rookie knuckleballer Gene Bearden, who wins his 20th game.

It was the year of a lifetime for Bearden: He had never been that good before, and he never would be again. Red Sox manager Joe McCarthy, who had won so much with the Yankees, ignores the well-rested rotation pitchers Ellis Kinder and Mel Parnell to go with journeyman Denny Galehouse, who was 8-7. It wasn’t a totally crazy pick: Galehouse had helped the St. Louis Browns win the 1944 Pennant. With the score 1-1 in the 4th‚ Ken Keltner hits a 3-run home run over the left-field fence. Indians shortstop-manager Lou Boudreau gets 4 hits‚ including a pair of homers‚ and finishes the year with just 9 strikeouts.

Who is still alive from this game, 64 years later? For the Indians, no one: Allie Clark, a South Amboy, New Jersey native whom the Yankees had traded with Joe Gordon to get Allie Reynolds, died this past April.  For the Red Sox, only Bobby Doerr and Tom Wright, with Johnny Pesky having died in August.

That same day, in St. Louis‚ Taylor Spink‚ publisher of The Sporting News, writes in a Baltimore newspaper that Baltimore will have an AL team within two years: "You can put a clothespin in this: Baltimore will be in the American League‚ if not next year‚ then surely in 1950."

He turned out to be off by 4 years. It was his hometown Browns who became the new major-league version of the Baltimore Orioles, following previous major- and minor-league teams with those names. Spink and the NL’s Cardinals were tight, and he didn’t particularly care whether the Browns moved.

October 4, 1959: Game 3 of the World Series is played at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, in front of a record crowd of 92,394. It is the first World Series game played in Los Angeles, in the State of California, indeed anywhere west of St. Louis. The Dodgers beat the Chicago White Sox, 3-1.

October 4, 1962: Game 1 of the World Series is played at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the first World Series game played in Northern California. The Yankees beat the Giants, 6-2.

October 4, 2001: Rickey Henderson hits a home run for the San Diego Padres, allowing him to score his 2,246th career run, passing Ty Cobb as baseball's all-time leader. The Padres beat the Los Angeles Dodgers, 6-3 at Jack Murphy Stadium.

And on the same day, Tim Raines Sr. plays left field for the Baltimore Orioles, while Tim Raines Jr. plays center field for them. It is only the 2nd time, and there has never been a 3rd, that a father and son have played in the same major league game. The first was Ken Griffey Sr. and Jr. in 1990. The Orioles lost to the Red Sox, 5-4 at Camden Yards.